Words 10.29

 Words Twice a Week     10.29

Some thoughts on some of the lessons for Sunday -

Joshua 3.7-17   Crossing the Jordan

+ this mirrors the Exodus, completing Israel’s Salvation Story of Deliverance from Egypt, wandering/learning/forming in the wilderness, receiving and entering into the Land.  It is begun and completed by God.  How would you tell your own “Salvation Story”?  When did it start?  How was God involved?

+ the experience affirms 2 things for Israel – 1) God is with them (in particular with Joshua as the successor to Moses) and 2) God is giving them the land – they are not taking it by their own strength or cleverness.  Of course, as we have said over and over, it becomes quite problematic when “God gives them land that “belongs” to someone else!”

Ps 107, 1-7, (8,9)?, 33-37

+ I guess it is supposed to be about Israel wandering in the wilderness, but you really can’t read vs 4-9 (“they wandered in a desert land”) without thinking of immigrants on the southern border, at least I can’t!

+ vs 7 says says essentially they were saved when they reached a town.  Is it the assumption that the town would take care of them?  That the town would do God’s work?

+ one writer notes that God “redeems” and “gathers” – it could refer to the Exodus (redeem) and the return from the Babylonian Exile (gather).  Where do we see God’s people today – more in need of being saved/rescued or of being gathered in?  What about you?  

+ Rescue here does not begin in God’s attentive love, but in Israel’s voiced complaint.  (“They cried to the Lord…”)  God responds, but does not make the first move.  “A thinking people first must become an out-loud, candid, complaining people.”  It takes real faith to complain “out loud”, not just to yourself!  Can we complain respectfully?

Matthew 23.1-12   Do what the Pharisees (church leaders) say, but not what they do…

+ Swanson says “First, stop and notice that Jesus says the Pharisees are right.”

+ Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary identifies the issue as “The distance between insight and performance.”  Suggesting that we are not really that different, it goes on -

As believers we may be perplexed by he existence of evil in the world, or we may wonder what in the world we can do in God’s name about a host of problems that are so big we cannot begin to correct them.  But there are many matters about which we have sufficient clarity to take action.  God has commanded us not to kill, but we go on arming ourselves to the teeth.  Christ has told us to love our neighbor as ourselves, but we pay farmers not to grow grain while children starve.  Christ has told us that if we have two coats and our brother or sister has none that we are to give one away, but we live in a world where homelessness increases by the day.  On basic maters such as the provision of food, shelter, clothing, and the making of peace, we fall dreadfully short of the mark to which Christ has pointed us.  Clearly our comprehension outdistances our performance, so that we are all too much like the pharisees in Matthew’s Gospel.

And -

Even our modesty tends to be immodest, so we choose the simplicity of elegance rather than the simplicity of charity.

And -

We suffer from the delusion that what we can accomplish can one day comfort us.  

+ Henri Nouwen reminds us all that really matters is the relationships we share, and knowing that we are each of us deeply loved.

+ ”The greatest among you is your servant.”  Do you hear that as “The one who is greatest should be serving”?  Or “Your servant is really the greatest”?  Or are they the same?  Or that in the Time of God’s Peace, there are no greater and lesser, and that all are servants of each other?

Then just a couple of things to notice from the lessons for All Saints Day, also this Sunday -

(Buechner says “In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief.  These handkerchiefs are called saints.”)

Rev 7.9-17

+ “Who’s that yonder dressed in white….?”  Do you hear Peter, Paul, and Mary belting it out?

+ Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb…?

+ The Time of God’s Peace is discontinuous from our time, at least as John sees it.  Our experience (suffering, presence of evil) is not the final word, and God really can wash something in red and have it become white!  Is that how you see it?  What does that mean for our time?

Matthew 5.1-12   Blessed are you….

+ Jesus goes up a mountain, as Moses did, and these beatitudes begin his Sermon on the Mount just as the Ten Words given to Moses begin the giving of the Law through Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

+ When I look up, what should I see –

    Whoa, Sweet Jesus on the mountaintop bringing everybody peace.   That’s Harry Chapin in The Cotton Patch Gospel.

+ The “you” is in the plural form in the Greek.  These are words for community, not just individuals.  Hard when we are essentially living as individual these days, or in small family groupings.

+ note that the first 8 beatitudes are in something of an A/B/A/B/C/D/C/D pattern, starting and ending with “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”, and the fourth and eighth having a concern for righteousness.  They kind of seem to alternate between active and passive, though maybe not all that clearly. The final, ninth beatitude, in a slightly different format emphasizes the beatitude of the persecuted. How do you respond to lists like this?

And here’s a prayer for All Saints from the UM Book of Worship -

  We bless your holy name, O God,

  for all your servants who, having finished their course,

  now rest from their labors.

  Give us grace to follow the example of their steadfastness and faithfulness, 

  to your honor and glory;

  through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Words 10.25

 Words Twice a Week         10.25 

(still waiting to get my computer back!)

And first, a couple of flashbacks -

+Jerry Jeff Walker, the man “who knew a man Bojangles and he danced for you” died last Friday.  

+and Oct 25 (yesterday) was the birthday of Anne Tyler – I just finished listening (audiobook streamed from the Library) to her latest book (Redhead By the Side of the Road) last night.  She’s written numerous books, including Saint Maybe, and Vinegar Girl, a contemporary retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

Some notes from the church calendar -

Oct 28 St Simon (the Zealot) and St Jude    About the first, Wikipedia says “one of the more obscure of the Apostles.”  About the second, it’s not really clear who he actually was, but there are some interesting legends connected with him.  Some say he was the groom at the wedding of Cana, and others link him with a kind of “Shroud of Turin” story -

Jude is traditionally depicted carrying the image of Jesus in his hand or close to his chest, betokening the legend of the Image of Edessa.  Eusebius relates that King Abgar of Edessa (now Şanlıurfa in southeast Turkey) sent a letter to Jesus seeking a cure for an illness afflicting him. With the letter he sent his envoy Hannan, the keeper of the archives, offering his own home city to Jesus as a safe dwelling place. The envoy painted a likeness of Jesus with choice paints (or alternatively, impressed with Abgar's faith, Jesus pressed his face into a cloth and gave it to Hannan) to take to Abgar with his answer. Upon seeing Jesus' image, the king placed it with great honor in one of his palatial houses. After Christ's execution, Jude Thomas the Apostle sent Addai, one of the 70 or 72 in Luke 10:1–12, to King Abgar and the king was cured. Astonished, he converted to Christianity, along with many of the people under his rule.   (Wikipedia)

St Jude is also known as the patron saint of lost causes - 

Among some Roman Catholics, Saint Jude is venerated as the "patron saint of lost causes". This practice stems from the belief that few Christians invoked him for misplaced fear of praying to Christ's betrayer, Judas Iscariot, because of their similar names. The ignored Jude thus supposedly became quite eager to assist anyone who sought his help, to the point of interceding in the most dire of circumstances. The Church also wanted to encourage veneration of this "forgotten" apostle and maintained that Saint Jude would intercede in any lost cause to prove his sanctity and zeal for Christ.  He’s the Patron Saint of a bunch of different organizations and locations, including the Chicago Police Department.  And St Jude’s Hospital for children.  (Wikipedia)    Hey, Jude…..

Oct 30 John Wycliff  (also spelled Wyclif, Wycliff, Wiclef, Wicliffe, Wickliffe!)  He was an early reformer and made one of the first English translations of the Bible.

And some from the world/earth calendar -

Oct 26 

+ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leader in the women’s suffrage movement died in 1902.

+ the Erie Canal opened in 1825, opening up the Great Lakes region to shipping, and encouraging the growth of midwest cities.  And a couple of good songs!

Oct 27 

+ Lou Reed died in 2013.  There is an asteroid named for him, and a velvet spider that lives underground in Spain called Loureedia.  (Reed was part of the band Velvet Underground.)  He said "I know my obituary has already been written. And it starts out, "Doot, di-doot, di-doot…""  Hey babe, let’s take a walk on the wild side…

Oct 28

+ Constantine’s victory at Milvian Bridge.  Legend says he had seen a sign, heard a voice, and put a Christian symbol on his soldiers shields.  After that Christianity became the state religion.  W Paul Jones writes “on the one hand this marked the end of persecution.  On the other hand, by uniting church and state there began a diminution of the gospel’s radicalness, a dilemma that haunts the church to this day.”

Oct 29

+ Wall Street crashed in 1929

+ first ball point pen sold in 1945.  Originally as a novelty that could write underwater, it replaced traditional pen and ink writing and helped foster “throw-away products” (and poor penmanship! -cw).

+ The National Organization of Women founded in 1966

+ Clarence Jordan died in 1969.  He founded Koinonia Farm in Americus GA, which Millard Fuller morphed into Habitat for Humanity.  Jordan wrote The Cotton Patch Gospel, which was then turned into a musical by Harry Chapin and Tom Key.

Oct 31

+ in 1517 Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the chapel door, kind of the blogspot of that day, touching off the Protestant Reformation.

+ Halloween – the eve of All Saints Day when in Celtic tradition witches and ghosts roamed free.  It is now the second most lucrative holiday in the US.

This week’s challenge - write a “ball point pen” haiku.

Here’s a prayer I came across that’s worth thinking about and praying this week -

Giver of Life,

what is it that makes us so desperate to have an “other”?

Is this something we have been taught?

Or is it, deep within us, our original sin?

Is it possible for me to just be me?

Or do I have to be “not you”?

Can it be enough to be myself,

Or does my sense depend upon being better than “them”

 – whoever I have defined “them” to be?

I may not be perfect, but I’m not ____________.

(Fill in the blank with the “other” of your choice.)

O God, where have I learned to think like this?

When did I learn to distort love into judgment?

Help me, God. Help me to see myself through your eyes.

Help me to break the chains of “othering.”

Help me to know that none of us may be perfect,

But every one of us is your child, beloved and accepted.

Help me, God. Help me.

        Elizabeth Moore, O.S.L.

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Words 10.22

 Words Twice a Week         10.22 

(at camp and still using older computer.  Hope it all works!)

Some thoughts about some of this Sunday’s lessons -

Ps 90.1-6, 13-17

+and this is kind of serendipitous – as I was getting started on this I was thinking that there were springtime images in the psalms and (song of) songs, but I wasn’t recalling autumn images, and then here comes Ps 90 – we are like grass, in the morning it flourishes; in the evening it withers!  Welcome to “withering time”!

+2 sections – the first, indicative (human describing God and humans [in less than positive terms – humans, that is]), the second, imperative (the human imploring God to relent, have pity.)  Note both use the word “Turn”.  Vs 3, “Turn back, O man” – I always heard that as “turn from sin to righteousness” (Godspell?), but really here it says “turn from life to dust”!  And vs 13, the human asks/tells/suggests God to turn from God’s intention.  Gutsy!  No wonder we call this a psalm of Moses, with whom God spoke “face to face”!

+“a thousand years are like yesterday”  -  God’s existence is, has been, will be forever (vs 2); ours is “3 score and ten”, they are soon gone and “we fly away”(vs 10).

+O God our help in ages past….  Time like an ever flowing stream/bears all it’s sons/daughters/”who live” away; we fly forgotten as a dream dies at the break of day.

+the psalm ends with “establish thou the work of our hands” – a wistful hope that we might leave something of ourselves behind.

Deuteronomy 34   Death scene of Moses

+from top of Mt Nebo (Pisgah?) God shows Moses the Promised Land, Moses dies and God buries him.  Why didn’t Moses get to the Promised Land? – well, because he didn’t.  So then the theologians and biblical writers had to come up with the cover story – “he must have sinned – O yeah, when he said he would bring water from the rock without giving God the credit.”  Do we sometimes do the same when we try to come up with answers to “why questions”?  In the Chapter a Day book (We have Always Lived In the Castle) the young girl tries all kinds of magical words and actions to make things happen or keep them from happening.

+God will give the land to Israel.  As we have said over and over, this gets extremely problematic.  What if some other god had given it to some other people?  What if God really did give the UP to the Anishinabe, and then we showed up?  Quoting from distant memory, didn’t Chief Seattle (or his scriptwriter!) say something like “How can you own the land?”

+Joshua takes on the leadership, but “God knew Moses ‘face to face’”.  I read once about the importance of having “larger than life ancestor heroes.”  They inspire us, but since we can never match them, it’s ok when we don’t live up to their standards.  Who holds that place in your life?

+and finally, it’s a death scene, but the focus is on the vision of the future.  As we think about death – our own, our families, our congregations, our species – what vision of the future keeps us going?  The Sacred Demise/Collapsing Conscientiously lady simply says “Live what you have left with love and integrity”.  Is there more?

1 Thessalonians 2.1-8

+Paul did not have a good time with the Phillipians, but he continued on (to the Thessalonians!) because he was operating on the basis of God’s word and vision, not human acceptance of acclaim.  Have you had times like that?  

+Not flattery nor greed but comfortable affection forms the most effective context for sharing the Word.

+Working for God is different than working for humans.  Contemporary illustrations?

Matthew 22.34-46   “Final Answer”

+What is the greatest commandment?” and “Whose son is the Christ?”  Note these are really two separate incidents and stories – Luke separates them by 10 chapters!

+the great commandment – 1) love God, and 2) love neighbor.  The vertical dimension is primary, but it entails the horizontal.  Does it go both ways?  Does loving your neighbor entail loving God, or can you do it without knowing anything about God, or does loving your neighbor teach you about God?

+”worship (public, private)...becomes the target of prophetic critique when it is divorced from the weightier matters of the law – justice, mercy, faith.”

+Jesus asks “Whose son is the Christ?”  Parsing out words, he could be a constitutional scholar, maybe even a Supreme Court Justice!  We watched What The Constitution Means to Me and heard about the justices (old, white guys) spending considerable time clearing their throats and talking about women’s rights and whether “shall” means “shall”.  When you get into that realm, you are pretty much distancing yourself from reality.

+So Richard Swanson notes that this is not only the “final answer”, it is the last time anyone asks Jesus a question.  (And it’s a throwaway question at that – one which any good Jew would be able to answer.)  Which is a tragedy if what we (us and God) are really trying to do is have a conversation.  Conversation entails question and answer – and not always agreement.  He quotes a colleague from the banking industry saying one of the first rules of leadership is “If you and I agree on everything, one of us is unnecessary”!  So – why do you think people stopped asking Jesus questions?  What question would you ask him?

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Words 10.18

 Words Twice a Week 10.18

(sent my computer off to get repaired – so this is done on an older model. Hope it all works!)

From the church calendar (kind of a quiet week) -

Oct 23 -

James, brother of Jesus Well, there are a lot of James in the New Testament and the early church, and probably some confusion between them. And some question about what it means to be “brother of the Lord”. Did Mary and Joseph have other children? Apparently James did not believe in Jesus during Jesus’ lifetime, but did after the resurrection and became one of the leaders of the Jerusalem church.

And a few days from the world/earth calendar -

Oct 21 -

+ birthday of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1772. Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink. When you mess with Mother Nature (in this case by shooting the albatross, in our case by loading the atmosphere up with heat trapping gasses) things don’t end well! Here’s a prayer by Wendy Robins -

    We share a common earth.

    We stand among each other.

    We share our planet,

    we share birth, death, hunger, and love.

       The sky opens above us and we receive space.

       The earth stands beneath us and we receive ground.

       The air becomes our breath and we are one wind.

       The water becomes our blood and we are one sea.

       Living things die for us.

       And we die, returning to the soil, sea, and air.

    We are the people of pain and fear,

    we are the people of anger and joy,

    we are the people of compassion and grace.

    In all of us is a longing

    for a life that has not yet come,

    for a world that is free and just,

    a dream of hope for all people.

+in 1983 the 17^th General Conference on Weights and Measures defined a meter as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of about three hundred millionth of a second. That’s handy. But wait a minute – “about”? (It had been defined in 1793 as one ten millionth of the distance between the Equator and the North Pole, and in 1960 as “1650763.73 wavelengths of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the levels 2p10 and 5d5 of the krypton 86 atom.”) Ok, maybe that distance light travels is not so bad after all. So does Menards have to order a whole new box of meter sticks each time, or can they just shave a little off the ends?

Oct 22 -

+the International Meridian Conference adopts Greenwich England as the initial longitudinal meridian – it’s where the day begins!

+Xerox copier invented in 1938

+5,000 troops intentionally exposed to a nuclear explosion in Nevada (1951)

Oct 23 -

+in 1964 Jean Paul Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize, saying that he did not want to take sides in the East-West struggle of the Cold War by accepting an award given out by a Western institution. Isn’t that an interesting concept – can you imagine someone today turning down an award (or a position) because they didn’t want to take sides between the Republicans and Democrats?

+Swatch announces “Internet time” – in Internet time, each day is divided into 1000 units called “beats”, each one is 1 minute, 26.4 seconds.

+Heeeeeeere’s Johnny – it’s the birthday (1925) of Johnny Carson

+and – it’s the birthday of “Weird Al” Yankovic! Wow - this day could use a few extra beats!

Oct 24 -

+The United Nations was founded in 1945

+Houdini gave his last performance in Detroit in 1926. He had a temperature of 104 – possibly due to being hit is the abdomen several days earlier – and a broken ankle. He died a week later of peritonitis and appendicitis.

+Rosa Parks died in 2005 –

    God of all,

    of all the different tribes and groups and factions that we classify ourselves into,

    thank you for the gentle strength you gave Rosa Parks,

    and for the courageous and powerful way she lived it out.

    We rejoice in the progress we have made,

    we lament the long way we still have to go.

    May the memory and spirit of Rosa Parks keep us going

      marching on till victory is won.

Oct 25 -

+Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400. Along with writing The Canterbury Tales, he is credited with the first use of about 2,000 words commonly used today, and to some extent being responsible for much of the shape of the English language. (It would be an interesting exercise to write a poem or prayer using only the 2000 words. Maybe for next week!) You can see pictures of the Canterbury pilgrims and three different “translations” of the first 18 lines here. Here’s a Celtic prayer for travelers – which we really aren’t right now, unless you count the trips to SuperOne and Menards! And back and forth to camp -

   Life be in my speech,

   Sense in what I say,

   The bloom of cherries on my lips,

   Till I come back again.

     The love Christ Jesus gave

     By filling every heart for me,

     The love Christ Jesus gave

      Filling me for every one.

   Traversing corries, traversing forests,

   Traversing valleys long and wild.

   The fair Mary still uphold me,

   The Shepherd Jesu be my shield,

   The fair Mary still uphold me,

   The Shepherd Jesu be my shield.

+Roger Miller died in 1992 – Dang me!

That’s the week -

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Words 10.15

 Words Twice a Week    10.15

[should have put this out at 5pm – then it would be 5, 10.15, 20]

Some thoughts on some of the lessons for this Sunday -

Ps 99   The Lord is our King

+ presented in the context of Israel and God making a covenant at Sinai.

+ God sees that fairness and justice are done in Israel.  What about outside of Israel?  And is that happening?  Fairness and Justice are objective, not subjective – would the Palestinians agree that fairness and justice are happening in Israel?  (Mixing governments and faith communities there, but then they are kind of mixed, aren’t they?  More about this in the gospel.)  How we hear this perhaps depends on if we feel like we are being treated with justice or not.

+ God forgives and punishes – just how does that work?

+ How do fairness and justice fit together in our “systemic racism day”?

Exodus 33.12-23   Time to Move On….

+ context; Israel (or the people who are becoming Israel) have been camped at Mt Sinai for a while now as Moses and God speak with each other.  But then there was the golden calf incident, and Moses smashed the covenant tablets (and the covenant?).  Now God tells them to head for the (“a”?) Promised Land, but that while they will still be God’s people, God himself/herself will not be going with them, because God cannot abide with sinfulness.  

+ So Moses begins a conversation.  Note Moses makes 3 petitions – to know God’s way, to have God’s presence with them on the journey, and to see God’s glory.  The first 2 are mainly Moses speaking and God responding with just a few words.  In the third, Moses speaks a few words and God responds with more.  Moses has been able to engage God in conversation leading to communion.  Does this reflect our prayer patterns and practice?

+ Note that Moses does that by referring to God’s character and history.  The “collect” prayer form begins with stating a relevant quality of God.  (Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open...)

+ The Promised Land – is it always somewhere else, in space or in time?  How tied are we to this space (our city, our church building or community) or this time?  Are we willing to go to some other place or time to be with God?  

1 Thessalonians 1.1-10    You are a fine example

+ years ago an older minister was talking about some particular fault or failing; he said, “It’ll ruin your testimony.”  I’ve remembered that for 40 years – though I can’t remember what he was talking about!

+ Is there a part of your life that would be a good example to others?  A not so good example?

+ I like this line - “Response to the gospel requires action as well as ascent.”

Matthew 22.15-22   Jesus deflects

+ the opponents – Pharisees and Herodians, two diametrically opposed groups (Richard Swanson raises the interesting possibility that the Herodians are really Pharisees in disguise), come to catch Jesus with an “unanswerable question”, like “Have you stopped beating your wife?”  He shows his authority by turning the tables on them.

+ writers suggest that the real focus of the passage is the authority of Jesus, and the “Render unto Caesar...” line is really not meant to be as much of the focus as we tend to make it.  It is not meant to be a “timeless maxim”.  In particular, Jesus does not mean to suggest that God and Caesar are two equal powers each with their own realm.  Humans bear God’s image, whatever realm they are in at the time.  Church and State are not as clearly separated as we might like them to be.  Here are a couple paragraphs from Texts for Preaching…

     Another way to put this is to say that the passage does not make God and Caesar to be equals, nor are they symbolic names for separate realms.  If so, one could be lead to the notion that the emperor has his realm in which ultimate allegiance can be demanded, and God is relegated to another realm. Quite the opposite is inferred in the text.  Humans bear God’s image, and wherever they live and operate – whether in the social, economic, political, or religious realm – they belong to God.  Their primary loyalties do not switch when they move out of church and into the voting booth.

     Read this way, the text does not solve the question of church and state.  It does not answer many lingering issues about Christians’ obligations to the government – taxation, military conscription, and the like – but it does set allegiances into an ultimate and penultimate order.  The text is certainly not iconoclastic regarding governments.  It gives space to political arrangements, but at the same time it conditions those arrangements by the reminder that not only we, but all God’s children, bear the divine image and therefore belong to God.  Furthermore, the text operates subversively in every context in which governments act as if citizens have no higher commitments than to the state.  When the divine image is denied and persons are made by political circumstances to be less than human, then the text carries a revolutionary word, a word that has to be spoken to both oppressed and oppressor.

+ so, what does it say to whom today?

+ and what/who holds what authority in your life?  I’m reading a book about a father/grandfather who is rich and tries to rule his children and grandchildren’s lives.

I came across this prayer this week -

God, help me to realize that it doesn’t matter what clothes people wear, how they cut their hair, or what color their skin is. We are all the same in your eyes, and with this awareness your children can move forward as a family. Discrimination deprives people of not only their civil rights but their human dignity. To overcome the evil challenges of our life we must turn to Christ, the good news of Jesus. Everyone deserves the love that you taught us to give to each other. I guess I am petitioning you not to miraculously solve a problem but to allow for an individual understanding of the violation against you and your world that blatant prejudice and discrimination commit.

- Nakela Cook, from Dreams Alive: Prayers by Teenagers, St. Mary’s Press, 1991, p.45.

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Words 10.12

 Words Twice a Week    10.12

Here’s a nice prayer for this week -

    Wake me up Lord, so that the evil of racism

    finds no home within me.

    Keep watch over my heart Lord,

    and remove from me any barriers to your grace,

    that may oppress and offend my brothers and sisters.

    Fill my spirit Lord, so that I may give services of justice and peace.

    Clear my mind Lord, and use it for your glory.

    And finally, remind us Lord that you said,

    "blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God."   Amen.

This prayer is from For The Love of One Another (1989), a special message from the Bishops' Committee on Black Catholics of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on the Occasion of the Tenth Anniversary of the Pastoral Letter, Brothers and Sisters to Us, the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter on Racism (1979). https://www.usccb.org/resources/prayer-service-racial-healing-our-land.

Now, a few notes from the church calendar -

Oct 15  Teresa of Avila   “a delightful, confident, good-natured, lively, competent Carmelite reformer.” (Jones)  A mystic and an activist, she was forced to defend her writings, including The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection, before the Inquisition.  Tradition links her with the Infant Jesus of Prague statue.  We saw it – and all the different clothes for it when we were there a couple of years ago.  She was one of the first women to be a Doctor of the Church.  She wrote 

    Let nothing disturb you.

    Let nothing make you afraid.

    All things are passing.

    God alone never changes.

    Patience gains all things.

    If you have God you will want for nothing.

    God alone suffices.

Oct 17  Ignatius of Antioch   One of the three most significant of the “Apostolic Fathers”.  On the way to Rome where he was martyred, he wrote a series of letters.

Oct 18  Saint Luke, Evangelist   Scholars credit him with writing the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles.  Tradition says he was a physician.  While he never speaks of himself as an eyewitness to Jesus’ ministry, there are three sections of Acts where he uses ‘we’, suggesting he was there.  Tradition says he was also the first icon painter – painting the Virgin Mary and Child, the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, and Our Lady of Vladimir.

And from the world/earth calendar -

Oct 12

- Robert E Lee died on this day in 1870.

- John Denver died in 1997.  Take me home, country roads….

- In 1492, after sailing the ocean blue, Columbus set foot on the Bahamas, setting off a troubling thread in our history.  W Paul Jones notes that in reality, it was the “Indians” who discovered Columbus. Forced removals, residential schools, the Trail of Tears are all sad and shameful chapters of the story that followed. Yes, we note that here in Marquette we lived on the Anishinabe homeland.  We are grateful for the way they cared for it and lived in it for some many years, and wish that we were doing as well for it as they did.

Oct 13

- Paul Simon was born in 1941.  Have a favorite song? – Bridge Over Troubled Water, Sound of Silence, The Boxer, or something more recent?

- Paddington Bear made his debut in 1958.  Here's a picture of the statue of him at Paddington Station.................................

Oct 14

- Speaking of bears, Winnie the Pooh made his debut in 1926.  I wonder, coincidence or planned, that Paddington appeared from “darkest Peru” almost the same day?  Anyway – 'let’s look after all these bears”!

- in 1947, Chuck Yeager was the first person to break the sound barrier; in 1984 Joseph Kittinger started on his 4 day solo gas balloon flight across the Atlantic.

Oct 15

- 202 years earlier, in 1782, Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier spent about 4 minutes in the air in a balloon made by the Montgolfier brothers.

- I Love Lucy first aired in 1951.  Chocolate, anyone?

Oct 16

- in 1986 Reinhold Messner, an Italian mountaineer, climbed Lhotse in Nepal, becoming the first person to climb all 14 8,000 meter peaks.

- John Brown was hanged in 1859 after leading a revolt at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.

- the Million Man March happened in 1995.

Oct 17

-in 1814, the vats burst at the Meux and Company Brewery in London, sending a 15 foot wave of beer through the streets that killed 8 people.

- in 1989, an earthquake hit the San Francisco area 20 minutes before the start of game three of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s.

- in 1849 Frederic Chopin died at the age of 39.

Oct 18

- Moby Dick was published in 1851.  “Call me Ishmael”, and “Thar she blows!” Have you read it?  And again, how did it make it’s mark on American, and even world, contemporary culture? (I’ll have a latte – venti – while you think about it!)

- in 1867, the US closed on the purchase of Alaska from Russia.  The purchase was seen as ‘folly’ (whose?) by many Americans of the day.

That’s it – here’s one of the collects for Compline from BCP -

   Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night,

   and give your angels charge over those who sleep. 

   Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, 

   soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; 

   and all for your love's sake. Amen.

      Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; 

      that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.

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